"Where is Lleida?" asked Wim Wenders when he was proposed to do his first photo exhibition in Spain. Neither Madrid nor Barcelona, nor Malaga nor Bilbao: for a German, it is not easy to pronounce Lleida, let alone locate it on the map. But in this provincial capital, surrounded by fields and almost two hours from the Pyrenees (despite the AVE station being called Lleida-Pirineus), the film director would exhibit, as in London or Berlin, his spectacular large-format panoramas, landscapes of up to four meters that he displayed at the headquarters of the Sorigué Foundation: the deserts of Arizona, the devastated Ground Zero in New York, the radiation of Fukushima... It was the year 2013, and the Sorigué Foundation was beginning to stand out on the international art scene with such a colossal project that seemed surreal. At that time, PLANTA was just an idea, to showcase large artistic installations - we are talking about a size worthy of the Tate's Turbine Hall - in the industrial estate of Plana del Corb, an active factory for the extraction and processing of aggregates, for the construction of concrete pipes or tunnel segments.
Among excavators, trucks, and bitumen silos, today PLANTA is already a reality, an exquisite secret for connaisseurs (and locals) that impresses every visitor. Including Wim Wenders. First, Wenders exhibited in the capital of Lleida, at the Sorigué offices, but when he traveled to the industrial estate, 20 kilometers from the city via a county road, he was fascinated by the post-industrial aesthetics: heavy machinery, steam, lunar-looking minerals, the aridity of the fields... Almost a mix of his frames of the American West in his mythical Paris, Texas with the final sequence of his acclaimed documentary Pina, when the choreographer dances in a gravel pit.
The Sorigué industrial estate under the typical fog of Lleida.
"There was a strong connection between the place and his work," admits Ana Vallés, President of the Sorigué Group and bold promoter of PLANTA. So much so that Wenders wanted to shoot a film there, in that very cinematic quarry. "He has already come twice and has spent several days filming. But he has many projects and his own timing...," Vallés explains.
Wenders' future film will be part of one of the most surprising art collections in our country, divided between the Sorigué headquarters in the capital of Lleida and its industrial estate. And on March 4, the ARCO Foundation will honor it at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid with the "A" Award for Corporate Collection. An award that coincides with the 25th anniversary of the collection's inception.
"It is a huge thrill for the entire team," acknowledges Ana Vallés at the Lleida offices. "When we started collecting contemporary art, our first major stage was ARCO. In 2001, we bought a canvas by Darío Urzay and last year an installation by Olafur Eliasson." This 2025, the choice of the ARCO piece will be left to the company's employees, nearly 4,000 throughout Spain: from a pre-selection of about ten pieces, employees will vote through the intranet for their favorite. "We want our employees to also feel ownership of the collection, to be corporate in the broadest sense. This implies a different perspective: it obliges us to bring it closer and explain it better," Vallés claims of a collection that exceeds 450 works and already stands out as one of the most radical in Spain, far removed from offices and the rigid corporate aesthetic.
Even in its headquarters, it is displayed in an atypical way: in the basement - set up as a conventional exhibition room- and in the parking lot, converted into a somewhat surreal warehouse, with pieces like an almost alien-like labyrinth by Cristina Iglesias (Vegetal Room XII), the two-meter red ring Blood Cinema by Anish Kapoor, one of the world's most sought-after artists, or a wardrobe and a chair covered in cement by the Colombian Doris Salcedo. "They are personal objects of victims murdered by the FARC and refer to their absence: under the concrete, there is no longer any oxygen, no one can fill the void they have left," Vallés explains of a work that particularly moves her. Everything is very modern and somewhat dark in this underground atmosphere, cyberpunk, that of a parking lot that could be the new trendy gallery in Los Angeles.
Behind the works, arranged as in an artist's garage-studio, there is a storage room with classical paintings, which were the germ of the collection. "My uncles, Julio Sorigué and Josefina Blasco, collected nineteenth-century paintings, very focused on the 19th century. They had wonderful works by Ramón Casas [a delicate nude in the bathroom] or Isidre Nonell [one of his powerful gypsies], even a drawing by Picasso. They donated their personal collection, about thirty works, to the Foundation. That's where it all began," explains Vallés, who in the year 2000 was directing the Sorigué Foundation (it wasn't until 2011 that she would take the reins of the entire group, founded in 1954 by her uncle).
From that tradition, the collection soon jumped to the most groundbreaking names in current art, with luxury advisors like the exquisite Barcelona painter Julio Vaquero ("he was the first to accompany us to galleries, he played a very important role," highlights Vallés), the beloved and late José Guirao (former director of the Reina Sofía) or the then director of the Prado, Miguel Zugaza, among others. Even Chris Dercon, director of the Tate in London, contributed his advice and vision when thinking of PLANTA as an artistic-industrial architecture in an active industrial estate.
If Casas or Nonell were the starting point of the collection, Anselm Kiefer is the ground zero of PLANTA: one of the most important living artists, the only one who has intervened in the Louvre with one of his monumental works, installed on the stairs flanking the Egyptian antiquities section. "We had three Kiefer canvases stored in different warehouses: they were so large that there was no space to store them. In 2008, we went through a difficult time due to the crisis, many of our teams were idle. We took advantage of that pause to build a building on our premises, designed to store Kiefer's work," Vallés explains.
After driving half an hour through cereal fields, a detour leads to the Sorigué industrial estate. Passing the asphalt products factory, in front of the aggregate mountains and the conveyor belts that transport them, a minimalist brutalist concrete block stands out, with an olive tree at the entrance and a stone path, like a zen garden. Upon crossing a double door under a reddish light, the visitor emerges astonished in a completely white room, a tailor-made white cube for a kabbalistic and spiritual triptych: the imposing ziggurat Shevirat Hakelim (3.3 by 7.6 meters), the seven celestial palaces Die 7 Himmels Paläste (4.7 by 5.6 meters), and the constellation Fur Velimir Chlebnikov (3.3 by 5.6 meters) with stars painted on the lead sheets of the original roof of the Cologne Cathedral. This is the Kiefer Pavilion.